


Make me an Angel in the Snow

by AndrogynousTablature



Category: Twenty One Pilots
Genre: Cotard syndrome?, Other, maybe but that's entirely up to you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-29
Updated: 2017-08-29
Packaged: 2018-12-21 12:00:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11943726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndrogynousTablature/pseuds/AndrogynousTablature
Summary: Exhaustion is cold. Ice is a welcome home in sleep.





	Make me an Angel in the Snow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [edy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/edy/gifts).



> A long time ago I wrote this with different names and faces and genders. 
> 
> Edy inspired this in an indirect way by rekindling my interest in cotard syndrome with their fairly local fic and I wrote this after delving into my old word documents of typed notes about it. Also i just uh... greatly admire them and so hi here's a gift, edy. There's an homage to you in it.

“Y’all alright in there?”

 

Josh sees his reflection start at the sound of knocking. He isn’t sure how long he’s been squatting by the sink in the centre of the tiny washroom, curled into himself and not knowing which way to move, staring at his silhouette reflected in the sheen of the wet floor tiles.

 

The roof of his mouth tastes like a magnet. It’s trying to pull the contents of his abdomen up his esophagus, organs and all. Sometimes he finds himself hunched over like this for two hours at a time, ears ringing, mouth full of ionic charges, unable to throw up. His organs are made of rubber and they won’t come up.

 

He wonders if there isn’t some parasite steadily feasting on his insides and once it’s taken enough from him and he’s empty and clean it’ll leave him be. He doubts it.

 

The knocking on the door intensifies. Josh realises he’s worrying the gas station manager.

 

He clears his throat, “’m fine.” He thinks he hears acid eating at his vocal chords. “Be out in a moment.” He waits until he hears footsteps receding before he straightens up slowly and meets his eyes again, this time in the mirror.

 

He needs a haircut, he thinks absently. He’s been thinking it for about a year, though, so he figures it can wait. The tap won’t run, so he opens the tiny window and sticks his hands into the snow because looking at them makes him think of drowning. He needs some sleep, but he’s been thinking that for about a week, too.

 

On his way out he buys food that he won’t eat and pays for gas he would rather not use up.

 

The first time he drove a car on his own he nearly wrecked, because he ran over a skateboard and was convinced for one panicked moment that the crunching bolts and axels were small bones, that the scrape of the griptape on the car’s tyres and against the pavement was a small, rasping breath. Josh feared he had killed the world’s only skateboard-shaped, unidentified mammalian life-form, but when he got out to check, he just saw various screws sticking into his tyres. He should have known, really, he had told himself as he drove carefully home. They didn’t sound like mammalian bones do, really. They had a hollow sort of sound.

 

Now he rolls to a stop an indefinite number of miles and series of frosted fields onwards from the gas station because there is an unidentified, possibly mammalian, life-form lying prone along the fading line down the middle of the road. Covered in frost and enshrined in a fucked up halo of disappearing daylight, it could be anything.

 

It’s not anything. Josh waits in the car until the light has faded fully, and the heap no longer looks like an angel broken from its fall. The car door creaks open like a slow, vocal unfurling of crumpled tinfoil and Josh climbs out, stepping cautiously forwards. He gets within a few feet before he realizes it’s not lying entirely still. He’s kneeling over it before he realizes it’s a person. Josh’s eyes are struggling against the cold to produce tears. He can’t quite tell who’s winning just now. The stranger is blinking in a way that makes him think of metronomes and a G minor triad, and when they turn their eyes from the sky he feels the weight of their gaze like it’s splintering his bones. The metronome has stopped ticking and they’re both staring now.

 

“Most toilets don’t actually flush in E flat, you know,” they tell him.

 

Josh blinks, and they take this as their queue to start doing so again, too. Their head lolls back away from him, hair shifting brokenly on the asphalt.

 

“It’s one of those things people like to say,” they say, sitting up, “Like ‘a duck’s quack doesn’t echo’. Of course it does. Why the hell wouldn’t it.”

 

Josh doesn’t know.

 

“Me neither,” they say. “But people like to say so to prove they’re smart and whimsical.”

 

He nods. There’s a blue light coming from the horizon and the moon reflects it down onto the two of them so that their skin looks ghostly and shadows look like fresh bruises.

 

Maybe it’s because he’s been tempted to run over the only other person he’s seen today, or maybe it’s because, looking at their wrists, he’s thinking about axels and screws and how much those strange, strange stranger’s lips look like griptape. Maybe it’s because they were lying so perfectly parallel to the lines down the middle of the road, maybe the moon tells him to do it. The moon doesn’t tell him to do it. He does it anyway.

 

“You want a ride anywhere?”

 

“Boy.” A wet, smacking click of tongue on grinning teeth. They stick a thumb in his face. “Would I have been lying in the road if I didn’t?”

 

Josh squints at the thumb. It almost stinks, but the winter air leaches out any sour flavour before it reaches his nostrils. It looks like it should stink, but do icicles take on smells? It takes Josh too long to realise what struck him about it. He eyes the concave shape of the finger pad “What happened?”

 

They make a show of cracking the joints in their fingers, watching with the same interest as Josh.

 

“Found a blender in the woods. Plugged it into my chest and stuck my hand in. Wanted to see who came out the other side.” A series of soft clicks as they twist their wrists in circles. “Turns out I’m Tyler,” they say cheerily.

 

Josh watches Tyler pull their body towards the moon, shedding a thin jacket and smoothing it to the road. It looks frozen in place for the most part, anyway.

 

Tyler doesn’t ask where he’s going, which is just as well, because Josh doesn’t know. Instead, they climb into the passenger seat of his car, pull their feet underneath them, and fiddle with the dials on the radio. If he were paying them less attention, he could probably have ignored the fact that they were barefoot.

 

The radio is of that ancient variety that produces a range of static that manages to crescendo and diminuendo in time to clicking of the motor when you’re in fourth gear.

 

Tyler stops fiddling with it and they sit in silence – Josh rolling his lips into his mouth, Tyler pulling the frost from their lashes and rubbing it between their fingers until the friction melts it. His teeth catch repeatedly on the loose threads of dead skin on his bottom lip as he suctions it in and lets it pop back out in time with the clicking of the motor in fourth gear.

 

Josh is fully aware that the car might stop functioning if he acknowledges how much Weird there is riding around inside it, and he’s doing his honest to god best to ignore it, but his stomach is starting to ache again and he almost bites through his lip when he feels the parasite writhing and wriggling near his diaphragm.

 

Turning away from Tyler to crank down his window, he clears his throat. “You hungry?”

 

The ‘h’ comes out sounding a lot like a sonar blip, so he’s not sure Tyler understands him, especially when they crank down their own window and stick their head through it. “I’m dead.”

 

Snow is falling into the car from both sides now. Josh vaguely feels his heart develop a hairline fracture, but he’s not sure why. “Uh,” he says uncertainly, “why? I mean, um, is there somewhere you need--”

 

“No,” Tyler cuts him off, turning their head back towards him, “No, you don’t get it. I’m dead.”

 

They’re good at maintaining eye contact for longer than is entirely plausible, Josh decides. He’s surprised he hasn’t wrecked yet. He turns his eyes back to the road and bites off a thread of skin from his lips. “Okay,” he says. Okay.

 

Tyler’s dead. It’s dark outside and Tyler is dead. And that’s fine. It really is, that’s cool and all, but now he’s crying. He’s fairly sure it’s not _because_ Tyler’s dead. It’s just a fact. Most toilets don’t flush in E flat, a duck’s quack echoes, and Josh’s eyes are leaking.

 

He hears them snort and shift in their seat, tucking their legs underneath them at a different angle. “Tears are for the living,” they tell him, and Josh believes them so instinctively that it doesn’t ever occur to him that he might be the dead one.

 

“I don’t cry,” Tyler says. “I don’t bleed, either,” Tyler says. “Crash the car and you’ll see. I won’t bleed.”

 

Josh pictures their heads thrown up against the fractured windshield, his bleeding a dark trail into the spiderweb cracks in the glass, Tyler’s titled towards him to watch. In his mind, Tyler’s head oozes a clear, watery liquid instead of blood, and it’s matting their tangled hair together, but Tyler’s smiling. The starlight bounces off their unreasonably sharp teeth and they click their tongue against them, sticking a thumb in his face.

 

Shaking his head to dispel thoughts and tears, he reaches over to feel their pulse and they’re Cold. Really Cold. That's no wonder, it's winter in Ohio and they were lying on the fucking frost-glazed road when they’re dressed more for fireworks and hot dogs and lemonade. Tyler says it's because that's how they were when they died. “You loose the will to change when you don’t need to.”

 

He wonders if they could possibly have been out here since July. He’s been on the road that long, but he has a thick jacket and he has his car. He eats when he has to. He cries and he bleeds.

 

“Do you, uh,” he fiddles with the material of his jeans. “Do you talk to people often?”

 

Tyler shrugs and licks strange griptape lips. “Sometimes. Sometimes they just prefer to run me over.”

 

Right. People are assholes. Josh hasn’t seen many recently, so he forgets sometimes. But sometimes he prefers to run things over, too.

 

The cold has eaten away at Tyler’s clothes so that they look both starched stiff and frayed to pieces. Josh thinks it's only because of the Cold radiating from their body that he can't smell it rotting. Maybe their veins run blue with antifreeze. Tyler laughs aloud because “you’re pretty funny, boy”, and cranks the window back up, leaning their head on it.

 

He's not sure exactly what the flavour his madness is at this moment, but by now he’s fairly certain that all the Weird drifting through the air vents in the car has tinged his brain a freshly bruised shade of blue. Maybe it matches Tyler’s veins. He can't be sure he didn't just think out loud, though, so he lets it go. Besides, Tyler looks happy, so he smiles and props his chin on the wheel, letting the car drift into the wrong lane. Unfortunately two hours go by without a car hitting them and Josh pulls over eventually to sleep properly. The snow is still falling in through his open window, and his entire left side is clammy and wet. There’s a field ringed in skeletal trees to their left and a lake that’s trying to freeze over on their right.

 

“I don’t think I’ll sleep,” Tyler says.

 

“The dead don’t sleep?” he asks.

 

Tyler laughs. “It’s been my best nap yet,” they tell him. “Come on, let’s sleep outside.”

 

So they climb onto the roof of the car and let the falling snow dampen the fractals of starlight bouncing off the lake and sketching a shaded kaleidoscope across the road and onto the bare trees.

 

“You breathe,” he says, because he sees it clouding the air. “Why do you breathe if you're dead?”

 

“Why is fructose sweet?” Tyler replies. “Of course there's a reason, but I don't know it, and, being, dead, I don't much care.”

 

This makes more sense to Josh than it should, so he drapes his wrists over the back of his neck and tilts his head back to count stars. He gets to twenty-one before he remembers to blink and realises he's crying again. It’s almost painful, the way the tears want so desperately to be hot, but they come out feeling like icicles, moving the way that glaciers do.

 

“I don't cry,” Tyler tells him again, with distaste.

Josh feels like a badly preserved glacier sometimes. 

“Because you're dead.”

“Because I'm dead,” Tyler agrees.

 

They look up now, too, and he waits for them to count to twenty-one, too, but they don't.

 

“You should try it sometime,” he says, eventually.

“What, crying?”

“Yeah.”

 

There's a pause while Josh lies down fully on the roof of the car, compacting the dusting of snow that has accumulated there. His nose starts bleeding despite the cold. His eyes are jealous of his nose because the blood really is hot.

 

“You could cry while you sleep, you know,” Tyler tells him, and Josh deems this acceptable.

“Are you real?” he asks after a brief silence.

“Oh, boy,” Tyler says.

“Am I real?”

“Oh,” Tyler says, “boy.”

“Are you really dead?”

 

Tyler sighs, then laughs like wild dog, all low shouting howls. The snow swallows the sound of their laughter so that it seems to end more quickly than it should but “hey, that's life for ya, kiddo.” There’s a moment of silence so absolute that pressure builds behind both of their eardrums and for a moment, neither of them is sure whether the ringing echo bouncing around their cochleas might be a duck’s quack. Where _do_ the ducks go in the winter? The lake is still trying to freeze over. Tyler laughs again and lies down next to him. “Boy.”

 

Josh closes his eyes. “I'm older than you.” 

Tyler shrugs, cold elbow rubbing his side. “Not by much. Besides, we all stop ageing after death, don't we?”

The stars are still shining their tiny fractals of light and Josh feels the beams shatter on his skin and break into tiny metallic shards, tinkling as they roll off him.

The snow is falling more softly now, and Josh thinks it's only because of the Cold now radiating from his body that he can't smell it rotting slowly.

 

“You know,” Tyler whispers around the snow gathering in their mouth. You know. “You don't have to come with me, you know.” Josh thinks they might be crying. He knows.

He blinks, once, slowly, one last time. “Where else would I go?”

They hum in agreement and start counting to twenty-one very slowly.

He's so tired.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> this is my first time trying to write with gender neutral pronouns! please let me know if it sucks or is stilted, as i say, it's converted from something originally written with other genders and i think i have yet to perfect how to avoid confusion and too much ambiguity


End file.
